7th March 2011 Archive

Intel is getting used to being the big chip on the data center campus, and it is not about to let upstart vendors peddling other chips (that means you, Advanced Micro Devices) or architectures (that means you, ARM Holdings and friends) move in on its server turf. Not without a serious fight, at least, and certainly not in the cloudy infrastructure portion of the server racket that is exploding.

Google has acknowledged that it removed "a number" of malicious malware applications from the Android Market on March 1, and it has now reached out over the airwaves to remove the apps from end users devices as well.

The box counters at IDC and Gartner have already given out their report cards for server sales and shipments in the fourth quarter and for the full year on a global basis, which El Reg has dutifully reported and analyzed. Just for fun, and perhaps to show us all what a real server market looks like, Gartner put out a set of statistics for the Asia/Pacific region.

A NASA scientist claims to have identified signs of extraterrestrial bacteria in meteorites, and if he's right, it means a strong boost to the theory that such entities are common and could be the origin of life on Earth.

Mass market music service We7 is moving closer to Pandora and Last.fm with the latest revision of its mobile app. It's not something that will appeal to music fanatics, who know exactly what they want, but should prove popular to the more traditional radio audience.

Few netbooks have been truly cheap - well, few of the decent ones, anyway - but now we're at the third generation of Intel's Atom processor family, an opportunity has arisen for netbook makers to offer less pricey models based on older chippery.

Upstart startup rocket company SpaceX, bossed by renowned geek idol and internet nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk, has recruited a NASA astronaut to help make the company's spacecraft ready to carry people into space.

Spanish drivers are less than impressed with a "temporary" reduction of the maximum speed limit on motorways from 120 to 110 km/h, which came into force today as a measure to reduce petrol imports by five per cent a year.

The “Protection of Freedoms Bill” has a wholly misleading title; the legislation simply does not do what it says on the tin. The CCTV provisions (see here) have more to do with efficient surveillance than privacy protection. We reviewed the Information Commissioner’s concerns about the use of personal data in DNA profiling or in vetting here.

Deciding to move to Windows 7 is the easy bit. The crunch comes in planning and executing the migration. Should it be a big bang or incremental? How much new hardware and software is needed? What can go wrong?

Germany is putting its legislative and industrial muscle behind a new secure email system, dubbed De-mail, that aims to become an alternative to conventional paper documents for legally binding transactions.

Nokia is flogging off the Qt commercial licensing and services business it acquired with Trolltech three years ago. Finnish software house Digia will pick up the business – and 19 developers from Nokia – for an undisclosed sum.

US government boffins say they – or perhaps their rivals – will soon roll out a new and much more efficient type of turbine generator which is expected to be a boon to so-called "thermal" powerplant technologies such as coal, gas, oil and nuclear.

Facebook applications are now barred from using Google's AdSense advertising network, and though the story behind the ban is less than clear, we can safely blame it on the increasingly heated rivalry between the two web giants.

If you’re one of the millions of people who have learned to love unreliable service and uncertain call quality, Skype has good news: its intention to introduce advertisements to inflate its value ahead of the IPO won't change a thing.

Australian DIY mobile app developer MobileNation has made its international debut at the DEMO start-up conference in the US and is currently dong the VC rounds. MobileNation was the only Australian company of the 53 start-ups selected to launch at the DEMO.

Opera has opened an app store that works across disparate mobile platforms. The store can be accessed from virtually any mobile browser on any major phone platform, but it's built straight into the company's Opera Mobile and Opera Mini browsers, currently used by over 100 million phone owners across the globe.

Novell is in the process of being eaten by Attachmate and having some juicy patents sold off to a holding company controlled by Microsoft, Apple EMC, and Oracle. And the company's top brass took a zero for the day and didn't face Wall Street when Novell announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended in January.